Practicing governance: pitfalls and potentials - a study of Bangladesh

Governance is a manner of undertaking activities performed for a state’s people by the state’s government to ensure development. Hence, it has scope of having conflicts between state policy and government bodies resulting poor quality of governance: abuse of rule of law, bureaucratic discrimination, corruption, poverty, inequality, low level of human resource development, low level of per capita income, poor utilization of country resources, etc. The reason for conflicts is poor governance vis-à-vis the result from poor governance, i.e., as there has conflict, there exists poor governance and at the same time as there exists poor governance, there has conflict. On the other hand, interrelationships between state policy and government bodies assist ensuring good governance: participatory, consensus oriented, transparent and accountable, equitable and efficient, etc. Developing nations like Bangladesh require having good governance in their countries for promoting development indicators: ‘country resource’ mobilization, increasing GDP growth, increasing per capita income, enhancing quality of socioeconomic indices of people, etc. The major of findings from this paper is ‘good governance for sustainable development’. This paper addresses issues of historical performance of governance exercise, obstacles towards good governance, and reforming agendas come up in past studies. The authors conclude by explaining why and how good governance is essential in Bangladesh for sustainable development.